Social Media Research and the Impact of Graphic Design: a case study examining an Indonesian political campaign
Outside imagery, graphic design is largely invisible to the research fields most interested in communication campaigns, seeing negligible research conducted from a design perspective. In an era of participatory culture, social media analytics offer new ways of quantifying audience engagement, but the blurring of the boundaries between producers, consumption and audiences through the phenomenon of 'produsage' offers richer, more contextualised insights into the impact of the designed aspects of campaigns. In examining Berakar Komunikasi's campaign supporting the 2014 and 2019 election bids of Indonesia's President Jokowi Widodo, our paper examines how qualitative social media research offers fine-grained insights into the reception of campaigns. The paper raises questions about the siloed nature of research where this neglects design's relation to cultural and social phenomena, thus underscoring the need for interdisciplinary research that brings an integrated framework of concepts and approaches to knowledge production where design is concerned.